As Donald Trump continues to bleat out not just false, but throughly delusional public statements, even the Associated Press fact checkers are getting punchy at this point. A new fact check of his largely inexplicable claims during Tuesday's Pelosi-Schumer meeting, the one in which Vice President Mike Pence closed his eyes and willed himself into the wallpaper, and resulting White House spin smacks of outright impatience.
To Kellyanne Conway's claims that "wall" does not necessarily mean "wall": Trump "has been saying wall, wall, wall, since the 2015 Republican primaries" and has "described the material, the dimensions, and the beauty of it, and had prototype sections build, and they are of a wall, not a fence."
To Trump's claim that terrorists are pouring into the country, the AP notes both that his specific claims of terrorism are outright addled, but that Trump himself on the very same day insisted that "Our Southern Border is now Secure and will remain that way." Thus, Trump "declar[ed] the border secure and insecure on the same day."
The major point, of course, is that Trump's claim that his precious wall is currently being built is a whole heap of crazy. The Associated Press, like every one of the rest of us, can dispense with that by simply noting that Trump's supposed "large new sections" of wall do not, in fact exist. There is no budget for it; there is no resulting wall. There are wall repairs, here and there. There's a candidate for the world's most expensive temporary string of razor wire, a military-strung effort that required the Pentagon to dispatch troops to the southern border and camp out for a while in an effort to give Donald something to point to in the last days of the midterm elections. But that's about it, because "Mexico" hasn't paid a dime and Congress hasn't either.
And at this point, even the fact checkers seem to be getting perceptibly annoyed with Donald's shit.
As to the question of just what the hell is happening in this man's brain, we don't know. Still. Again. Trump may be so dementia-addled that he believes the "wall" prototypes he prominently toured in Southern California were the real thing on the real border, or he may be so detached from even the pretenses of honesty that he would rather insist on invisible progress, for the Fox News crowd, then worry about the rest of the public coming to the conclusion that he is out of his gourd. Either explanation renders him manifestly unfit for the presidency. Or for any government position. Or for a managerial position in any of this nation's fast-food franchises.
He is either delusional or an intentional liar and ought to be booted from the office for that alone, even setting aside the now-known criminal acts, the now-known tax evasion, or the now-known light treason against his country. Instead we get absolute silence from Republican lawmakers, still, as every neutral, professional observer ticks through the daily list of things the sitting president is flat-out lying to the public about.
I still don't know what an appropriate punishment for that is. Merely tossing them out of elected office seems inadequate, but catapulting them into the middle of the Atlantic with nothing but Donald's tweeted insistence that he has granted them gills might be a bit much.